Mark Leonard, Ashok Roy and Scott Schaefer
Technical Bulletin Volume 29, 2008
Abstract
Jean-Honoré Fragonard painted two versions of 'The Fountain of Love' around 1785. One version of this iconic image was part of the Wallace Collection bequest, London, in 1897; the other was rediscovered in the United States in 1996, and subsequently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
The Wallace Collection painting has now been cleaned and restored by Mark Leonard, visiting conservator from the Getty Museum. Comprehensive technical study of the two versions was carried out when the paintings were brought together in the National Gallery, and yielded much new information about Fragonard’s radically different technique for each work, elucidating their evolution and relationship.
Keywords
cross-sections, eighteenth-century French painting technique, The Fountain of Love (Getty Museum), The Fountain of Love (Wallace Collection), Jean-Honoré Fragonard, GC–MS analysis, paint analysis
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Two Versions of 'The Fountain of Love' by Jean-Honoré Fragonard: A Comparative Study, Mark Leonard, Ashok Roy and Scott Schaefer (text-only RTF 0.14MB)
To cite this article we suggest using
Leonard, M., Roy, A., Schaefer, S. 'Two Versions of "The Fountain of Love" by Jean-Honoré Fragonard: A Comparative Study'. National Gallery Technical Bulletin Vol 29, pp 31–45.
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/technical-bulletin/leonard_roy_schaefer2008
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